Yes, ezboard has been caught out blaming its woes on “Smalltalk” from Cincom again.

Back in March 2006, Cincom’s James Robertson posted a blog entry entitled “Correcting a Misconception” following which Robert Labatt seemed to have back-tracked somewhat on blaming Smalltalk and instead blaming “…[ezboard's] bad software design that happens to use Smalltalk…”.

So things were smoothed over … until ezboard went and did it again, accusing Smalltalk of being “obsolete”. They went further:

“The current program has many bugs that can’t be fixed because each time the developers try to fix them, it causes something else to break. That seems to be the nature of Smalltalk.”

So it’s not a developer issue, it’s a platform issue.

Cincom’s James Robertson has posted a response here which makes interesting reading:

“Instead, they wrote their own server from scratch. They didn’t use a database on the back end, instead serializing objects to disk. Those two early decisions came back to haunt them in a big way - we actually spoke to them about dealing with them inside Smalltalk…

“…they decided to go with a full rewrite in something else, and a general blasting of our product as a way of making excuses. There’s no reason for them to do that.” [emphasis added]

Yes there is: it’s an attempt to deflect criticism away from ezboard to someone else, a not uncommon response.

And this will almost certainly be true:

“Just look at what they say instead: fixing bugs creates other ones. That has nothing to do with Smalltalk (or any other language, for that matter) - it has to do with whatever process they use to develop code. If that’s happening to them now, I guarantee that it will happen to them in the future, without regard to what development/deployment platform they end up using.”

I wonder if ezboard’s development failings - and indeed, past security issues - continue to plague them now? Certainly there are more bugs in Yuku than an entomologist’s study cases. And as for security, well, even ezboard’s CEO Blog, written using WordPress, is two builds out of date, with all the security issues that entails…